Dead water - Barbara Hambly [123]
Thucydides, he noticed, was letting the current carry him farther down, toward a point of land separated from the others, where Julie could get ashore without being noticed. Mindful of the number of outlaws still roving around the woods, January followed.
Water splashed in his mouth and his eyes, and under the surface nameless things—branches, rotting trees, what felt like tangles of submerged rope—tore and grabbed at his ankles. Even in low water the tug of the current was like a giant's hand. Rose pulled her skirts and petticoat up around her waist and slipped the lower part of her body into the water, kicking, too.
They were both breathless and numb when the door finally grated on sand.
Then all they could do was lie on the muddy bank among the dead trees and mats of leaves, feet in the water, gasping for breath and staring up at the cloud-puffed blue of the sky. It wasn't even noon.
That morning before dawn, Hannibal had been rowed over to the bank to shoot and be shot at by Kevin Molloy, now sunk, with Oliver Weems, and Levi Christmas, in the wood and iron coffin of the Silver Moon.
The duel seemed weeks ago. January tried to calculate when he'd last slept and realized it had been on the floor of Hannibal's stateroom the night before last, the night that Weems had been murdered by the conductors of the Underground Railway because he'd tried to blackmail the wrong man.
“I suppose all the sheriff of Issaquena County is going to have to do is bring a posse out here on the first moonlit night,” mused Rose, rolling painfully over. She'd lost her tignon in the river, and her long brown hair hung down soaked over her shoulders like seaweed. She fished her spectacles from her skirt pocket, put them on again, and looked back at the river, where smoke still poured from the tall stacks of the Silver Moon, still visible above the surface of the water. Mr. Souter would have to warn other pilots of it as they came bowling down the river to Brock's Wood-Yard.
She went on. “He'll be able to round up most of Christmas's men when they go diving to try to find the gold in the wreck. . . . Did you mean it when you said the gold wasn't even on the boat?”
“I think so.” January heaved himself shakily to his feet and took Rose's hand, led her up the muddy bank. All around them rats were scrambling up out of the water, shaking their brown coats and trotting purposefully off into the woods. They probably have relatives in the neighborhood.
Forty or fifty yards upstream, he could see the door Thu and Julie had used for a life-preserver, lying near a tangle of beached snags. Movement caught his eye and he saw 'Rodus limping down the bank, then turning aside into the tangle.
Hand in hand with Rose, January made for the place, walking slowly and stumbling every now and then into potholes in the bank.
“Molloy stole something from Weems's stateroom,” he told her. “Something that could be easily pocketed, and could be taken all at once, not like six hundred pounds of gold or even a couple of valises of securities and Bank of Pennsylvania notes. Something that was hidden with the same copy of the Liberator that mentioned Judas Bredon's speeches and involvement with, not only Abolitionism, but with the Underground Railway. It was something that Weems thought he could retrieve easily, too—hence his searching the staterooms of everyone on board whom he thought might have had reason to steal it. It would have been easy enough for Thucydides to tell him that some member of the slave-gang had seen Molloy hide something somewhere, to get him to go down to the promenade deck at midnight.”
“It sounds like a key,” said Rose. “But Molloy didn't have